Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Big data and the Olympics

NBC has unleashed a huge amount of data about how Americans watched the London Olympics: we watched on TV, yes, but we also watched on NBC's web sites, on our computers, tablets, and phones. We tweeted and posted comments on Facebook. And, the New York Timesreports, a bunch of us participated in studies about what we did. The data don't seem to be available publicly yet, but NBC Universal (the research lab) shared some of its conclusions with the Times. Here are some of the findings:

[E]ight million people downloaded NBC’s mobile apps for streaming video,
and there were two billion page views across all of NBC’s Web sites and
apps. Forty-six percent of 18- to 54-year-olds surveyed said they
“followed the Olympics during my breaks at work,” and 73 percent said
they “stayed up later than normal” to watch, according to a survey of
about 800 viewers by the market research firm uSamp . . . .

The results signaled vast changes from just two years ago in Vancouver,
when tablets and mobile video streaming were still in their infancy. The
two most streamed events on any device during the London Olympics, the
women’s soccer final and women’s gymnastics, surpassed all the videos
streamed during the Vancouver Olympics combined.

Fascinating. That's all I have time for today, but I will keep an eye on the story.